CANNIBALS STILL

Waikato Times, Volume 125, Issue 20990, 18 December 1939, Page 14

CANNIBALS STILL

NORTH ARNHEM LAND TOUR BY MISSIONARY (From a Correspondent) SYDNEY, November 29 Two hundred and fifty aborigines, members of the three tribal groups in North Arnhem Land, practise cannibalism regularly in the belief that eating human flesh will increase their prowess and skill as hunters. The aborigines openly confessed to cannibalism in statements they made to Gordon Sweeney, Methodist missionary, who visited North Arnhem Land in August and arrived in Darwin this week. Well-established Practice “The natives. do not kill each other for food,” said Mr Sweeney, “but they eat those who die in tribal battles or are fatally bitten by crocodiles. They never interfere with the bodies of children or those who have died from old age.” Mr Sweeney has handed to the Native Affairs Department a valuable report on information he gleaned about natives in North Arnhem Land, about whom little was formerly known. In four weeks he tramped 230 miles, travelled by launch to the navigable heads of the Liverpool and Tomkinson Rivers, and visited 1300 natives, all of whom he found living under the same social system. Mr Sweeney said he did not know if the natives practised ritual cannibalism. To find that out would mean waiting for the next appropriate death and investigating the ceremonial employed. He found that | cannibalism was a well-established | practice in the eastern section of the I area he visited, but in the west it was dying out as a result of contacts the natives made with non-canni-I balistic tribal groups and the influi ence of the missions. Splendid Physique The natives near the coast weie of a better stamp, probably because lof the influence of Bacassar and j other extraneous blood. The way in which they paddled their canoes out to sea in all weathers in search of { sea food resulted in splendid physical development. ! Mr Sweeney made his patrol to ! rather information to enable the i North Australia Methodist Mission to j give spiritual and material aid to aborigines. Formerly a surveyor I employed by the Government in the